Otherside
by The Emu
Summary: Faith makes a decision
1. Default Chapter

  
  
"So...The new Slayer?"  
"There isn't one."  
"..."  
"Faith, the line runs through you now."  
"I..."  
"You are the Slayer."  
"I know that..."  
"Faith, not a slayer, the Slayer."  
  
Once again her feeble grasp of the English language evaded her. Ok, she had got used to the fact that she was a slayer. She didn't have many options available to her to do anything but get used to it, but she had always been the backup one. The spare. Buffy had been the big cheese Slayer whom the fate of the Earth, edging on apocalypse, depended on.  
Now it was her.  
She was the Slayer  
The Slayer.  
You had to understand the power of that little three-letter word.  
  
"Ok, honey, wrap it up."  
"...I have to go."  
She put the receiver back on the handle.  
  
Faith was escorted back to her wing in a dazed silence. The usual sounds of G wing (Cussing, murmuring gossip in small huddles. More often than not, both aimed at her) were muffled to her like she was surrounded by a big damper as she made her way up the metal staircase to her cell.   
  
This had been the one of the very few calls that she had got in her 18 months locked up. Not surprisingly. Faith wouldn't phone herself either if she were a Scooby. The only phone calls had been from Angel who had endeavoured to keep a line of communication open between them. She hadn't received it as enthusiastically as he'd hoped. She was perfectly civil but it seemed that her mind was always somewhere else. She sounded distracted; bored. And so the phone calls had grown shorter and the time between them had stretched and stretched. After about 6 months the outside world had all but forgotten about her.   
  
That's how she wanted it.  
  
Sitting in her cell, she was all too aware of the loneliness around her. This wing of the prison had a policy of putting anyone trained in fighting in separate cells. They had introduced this policy a few weeks after Faith's arrival. It had taken two inmates in the hospital wing before they had got the message. Faith wanted to be alone.  
  
She didn't like being alone. 'Wanting' was really the wrong phrase to use. She felt that it was more a case of necessity for her to be by herself. It was the easiest way for everyone. But she didn't like to be alone. The emptiness of the cell yawned around her.   
She would say that it enveloped her but it wouldn't be right. It wasn't in any kind of contact with her. It was a distant feeling.  
  
She almost laughed at herself. What kind of poetic shit was she coming up with these days? It came from being sitting on her own all day, every day. When you don't have any company but your own mind, you find you start to embellish things. So what the hell? She was a poet. What? It wasn't like anyone was going to find out.  
  
She thought about poets. They were loners usually, complaining that the world doesn't understand them. Well the mould fits so far. 'Would I make a good poet?' She attempted to recite some kind of poem that she had learnt in junior high. It was about daffodils and clouds. It came out stilted as she tried to summon it from the thick tar that consisted of the back of her brain. Everything in it was obscured and it took a considerable amount of effort to prise out.  
  
She frowned. The lines didn't sound right coming out of her mouth. Perhaps she wasn't cut out for that kind of poetry.  
  
"There was a young woman from Ealing  
Who had a peculiar feeling.  
She leant on her back  
And opened her crack  
And pissed all over the ceiling."  
  
She let a small smile slip onto her face. That was more like her. But she knew that she was just trying to skirt the subject in her   
mind. The one who kept on marching up into the front of her brain, throwing the dandelions and young women from Ealing onto their ass and screaming at her in the face.  
  
"How the hell can you be the Slayer?"  
  
Here she was locked up in a maximum-security prison with a life sentence and she was supposed to fight the vampires, demons and things that go bump in the night, along with averting the odd apocalypse on the side. That was not going to happen. The world, at this moment in time, was in serious shit.  
  
And what did the Watchers Council intend to do about that? Did they intend on getting her out of prison? Why can't they just call another Slayer?  
  
Could they? Without the previous Slayer being...  
  
Dead.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	2. Take it on the Otherside

She didn't like the choices put in front of her. But there seemed to be no contest between the two options.

1) Kill yourself. The line will continue on and the world will return to the relative consistency of having at least one Slayer out there finishing off vampires.

2) Stay alive here until the world either is run over by Demons or you are killed by some kind of Council assassin.

How long how long will I slide

Separate my side I don't

I don't believe it's bad

Slit my throat

It's all I ever.

If she did die, it would probably be the bravest thing that she did in her life. As much as it hurt her to come to that conclusion she was more use dead than alive. She had been going over every possibility in her mind. They all came back to the same conclusion. She couldn't escape and try to fight vampires at the same time as running away from the police. She'd done it before but as a long-term solution it didn't really pose great prospects. She'd be killed by one of the two sides.

Centuries are what it meant to me

A cemetery where I marry the sea

Stranger things could never change my mind

I've got to take it on the otherside

Take it on the otherside

Take it on

Take it on.

Make that three sides. The other option was if the Watcher's Council took her back. She trusted them about as much as she would trust Angel after an extremely blissful day. They'd ice her themselves to spare them the trouble of keeping her out of the way of the law.

Life was never fair.

I heard your voice through a photograph

I thought it up it brought up the past

Once you know you can never go back

I've got to take it on the otherside.

She looked at the photo that she kept hidden in her locker. She didn't know why she kept it. Corners were burnt from where she had set it alight multiple times but decided against it. There was tip-ex over a good portion of it where she had recently covered up the graffiti and abuse that previously decorated it. It was taken at night when the Scoobies had all taken a break. Oz's face was relatively clear; Xander's had still graffiti over his. Willow's was hard to make out and Buffy's and Angel's were almost non-existent. The worst was hers though. It was simply a big gaping hole. She couldn't bear to part with it though, despite all her efforts to throw it away.

Pour my life into a paper cup

The ashtray's full and I'm spillin' my guts

She wants to know am I still a slut

I've got to take it on the otherside

She folded up the photo and put it in her trouser pocket. 

The cell contained no sharp objects. All edges were rounded. If a person were having the kind of thoughts that were whirring through Faith's mind, then a person would have a hard time making anything out of them.

Faith wasn't just a person though.

Scarlet starlet and she's in my bed

A candidate for my soul mate bled

What would she do for a chance to apologise to Buffy? To everyone?

Push the trigger and pull the thread

I've got to take it on the otherside

Take it on the otherside

Take it on

Take it on

The metal slats of the bed frame were suddenly exposed as the mattress whipped off. If the suddenly unearthed slats weren't expecting that then they were certainly surprised about what happened next. Faith's foot came slamming down onto them. The hit had enough force to split one of the strips of metal, now brittle with age down the middle. She looked at the jagged edge. That would do.

Turn me on take me for a hard ride

Burn me out leave me on the otherside

I yell and tell it that

It's not my friend

I tear it down I tear it down

And then it's born again

She felt strangely calm. Faced with death she didn't believe that it would be all that bad. 

She looked at the photo one more time.

"See you on the other side"

How long I don't believe it's bad

Slit my throat

It's all I ever.


End file.
